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Month: November 2014

Occasionally, I like to flatter myself in thinking that I have surrounded myself with the greatest assets which the world has to offer. It has therefore dawned upon me that I owe a great deal to these people who have shown me paths to enlightenment time and again, and that has been my agenda for my past few posts. However, few of even those whom I am grateful to have contributed to me as the subject of this post has, for this person has not only been a valuable asset to my present, but has shaped my future and rekindled my past.

But this post is not about me, for I couldn’t honestly write two lines about myself without enduring a plethora of writer’s blocks, and to be fair to myself, I justify the fact that we always know someone else better than we know ourselves. No, this post is not about me, this post is a tribute to one of the most essential people in my life. As it is a tribute, I am required to hold the negativities about my friend, however, instead of doing that, I have decided to write about how even the most negative features of some people, particularly this person, are actually not negative at all.

People are riddled with flaws. This is a fact which applies to everyone, all over the world, indiscriminately. Sometimes, in moments of selective blindness which we have all experienced at some point in our lives, we chose to ignore these flaws and accept the person for their positive qualities. However, there are times, precious few, when we encounter people in whom we cannot seem to locate any flaws, despite being fully aware that there must be some, because they are after all human.

So why is it that our inner eye, which is otherwise so perceptive and rather accurate in the identification of flaws in people, blinded in the case of these special people? Often, it is because that person holds a special bond with us, and since those flaws threaten the breakage of that bond, we tend to ignore their existence altogether. In certain cases though, we find that these bonds have nothing to do whatsoever with the absence of the flaws, or rather our inability to locate them.

You see, flaws have a rather elusive nature, in that what may be flaw for one person, is an attribute to another. Flaws have learnt to survive in our modern, co-dependent society by putting on an appealing façade, which prevents our comrades from seeing them for the menacing atrocities that they really are. Flaws have their own way of propagating and, when left unchecked, of redefining the person as we know them.

Perhaps that makes the person I am speaking of all the more special, perhaps it doesn’t and I am being blinded right now. I don’t know, and whereas it sounds horribly ignorant and vehemently un-scientific of me, I really do not care. For this person who is compelling me to write about flaws, is flawed in the best way one could be flawed. The flaws this person has managed to amass are not ones which you would tend to ignore, but ones which you would tend to appreciate. I can understand how this may sound extremely biased and frankly quite off the mark, but there are certain flaws, very chosen few, which accentuate the overall character of a person.

My dear friend, who is celebrating their coming of age today, has managed to do just that. This is hard to explain, not because there aren’t words which can describe the phenomenon, for there are always enough words, and not because I am too incompetent to use them to my aid, which I flatter myself in thinking that I am not. The reason this is hard to explain is because it is impossible to draw parallels to what you can only assume is the most singular phenomenon of all.

How do you explain not the lack of flaws, but the presence of perfect flaws? How do you explain the concept of a person so perfectly crafted that even their imperfections are perfect? Whereas this may seem like a paradox, or, more likely, this may seem like the ramblings of a person who has been too deprived of sleep and under the influence of suspicious substances, there is meaning to it all. For a person without imperfections isn’t perfect, as they are not really a person. By the established definition, everybody ought to have imperfections, yet what do you do when the imperfections themselves are so perfect that you cannot, in all faith, find anything to flaw in a person?

Such is my plight, and privilege, as a result of finding friendship in whom I can only describe as the most perfect person upon the planet. This statement is heavily biased, but I won’t retract it, and neither will I apologise for it. There are some things we believe are true, there are some things we wish are true, and then there are things which we just know are true. They don’t have a reasoning behind them, they are just true. I won’t impose that truth on you, because it’s not a universal truth. It’s my truth, but it’s the truth.

This particular fact is one of those things. My friend’s presence of the perfect imperfections isn’t a universal truth, it isn’t my belief, and it certainly isn’t something I wish were true, for the menace that is envy is ever-prevalent in this rather special association, it’s just something which I know is true. I realise this most of all in engrossing conversations with this person, because the conversations show me how even the small things which you expect to go wrong with a person, are in just their perfect place in just the right amount.

Whereas this subjective, biased, silly and completely senseless post now draws to a close, there is one thing which shall remain ever onward, and that is the one thing which I hope people will take away from the thousand or so words written here. There is a certain joy in being perfect, and a certain joy in being around those who are perfect, but the greatest joy of all, is knowing that you are a part of something which has just the perfect imperfections, because that makes the perfection seem so much more real

Recently, I have had a lot on my plate, perhaps more than I can handle, maybe even more than is sensible to have. There are times when I simply wish to recede into a small, dark corner of the world and wait for the time to pass until I can resurface in a simpler place, with less worries gnawing at the edges of my sanity. Perseverance and the promise of the light at the end of the night seem to be companions of a past which has long since passed.

Hope, like many other things of immeasurable value, can be extremely difficult to locate, what with the constant aura of negativity around us. Therefore, I believe, that it is our duty to congratulate and hold on to people who have found hope, for they are our escape route from the murky waters of depression.

Today is a day of immense importance. Today marks the birth anniversary of a person who is perhaps the living image of hope. If hope were to come out and assume a humanoid form, I am convinced it would be that of the person of whom I speak. This person isn’t a wise, learned old scholar who has spent days wandering the narrow, dark, dismal corridors of an exasperated mind. No, this person is a kind-hearted, intelligent soul who believes that eventually we will overcome, for there is nothing which we, when we unite as one, cannot surpass.

These views have always seemed, to me as I do consider myself quite the pessimist, to be optimistic to the point of being ridiculous. Hope is not the answer to the very real, very tangible issues plaguing the human civilisation and, indeed, Planet Earth itself. Hope is not the solution to the absence of hope, for if it were then many a psychiatrist would be out of a job. Hope is not the key to unlocking the secrets of a greater and more promising life. Along the lines of these are further arguments which frequently cross my mind whenever this person and I engage in a conversation about the derogatory nature of society, yet I refrain from voicing them.

It is not about hope being the answer, though, as I have recently learnt from this person of whom I can only speak highly and with sheer respect and admiration. Hope is not about finding the answers, or the keys or anything really. Hope is about keeping up with the negativities and telling them to give you some breathing room so that you can think, you can process what is happening all around and assess you situation, so that you can come up with the best solution to the problem at hand.

Now this lesson hasn’t explicitly been given to me, but I have managed to interpret this and even though this leaves room for error, I take comfort in the fact that these are the kind of messages I am now able to derive from the words I once considered foolish and childishly optimistic. It gives me a certain sense of hope too; it gives me the hope that not everything and everyone in this world is rambling on about nothingness, that there is at least one person who knows something worth knowing.

Another remarkable thing about my unofficial mentor is that I have never seen even the slightest trace of hardship on this person’s face. We all have our issues, some are mountains looming in the near future challenging our paths ahead, some are demons from our pasts threatening to pull us back into their devilish clutches, and some are elephants in the room we willing to turn our backs upon. In any case, we have negativities plaguing our minds, and this is perhaps one of the defining features of our consciousness, a significance of ours as human beings. Yet even when worst comes to worst, I have never see our subject give way to the vortex of sorrows, which I believe is one of the greatest achievement’s of anyone, ever.

I am, of course, highly biased in favour of the person who taught me the meaning and importance of hope, but I cannot say it enough times for the words to successfully describe the sheer aura of positivity and the extent of hope that radiates from the aforementioned. It is my strong-founded belief that it would take something phenomenal for my mentor’s hopes to be deterred; and should such a scenario ever present itself, I shall take it for granted that mankind has seen its end.

Coming back to my situation of having bitten off more than I can chew: I was sorely tempted, until the beginning of writing this post in fact, to follow my tried and tested, and rather unsuccessful, method of disappearing into the shadows of the world. However, as I sat there, flitting from one task to the next, starting each one and leaving it midway, I though of how much further I had come ever since that one fateful night in the middle of September of last year. I thought about how my choices reflected the people I chose to associate myself with, and what I had learnt from them.

Suddenly, like a brilliant flash of inspiration, it hit me that even in the darkest, most dreary times of all, one can find hope, if only one has the strength to look for it, and stay on their course against all odds. There may seem times when all hope is absolutely lost, which is more often than not every other day of my life; in such cases, one simply has to do some soul-searching and create hope from within, which will promote the discovery of further hope, just like a chain reaction.

I knew that this realisation absolutely hadn’t come from within the dark and hollow pits of my plagued mind, and so I was, for a few moments at least, at a loss for the source of this inspiration. Needless to say, after having said it multiple times I mean, that the source of this sudden bout of positive energy was my dear friend.

That little jolt of inspiration is, in fact, all I needed to get back on my feet, and now I am ready to tackle whatever it is that needs tackling, until I hit my next low point of course. I realise how this would not have been at all possible had it not been for the wonderful person to whom I dedicate this post, as a small token of gratitude; thank you for showing me how to find myself when all seems lost.